The collection consists of manuscripts and typescripts, correspondence, diaries for 1941 through 1977, notebooks, legal documents, portraits, and pictorial works.

Biographical/historical information

Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian and American novelist, poet, short-story writer, lecturer, and literary critic.

Scope and arrangement

The collection consists of manuscripts and typescripts, correspondence, diaries for 1941 through 1977, notebooks, legal documents, portraits, and pictorial works. The manuscripts and typescripts include holographs, photocopies, drafts, and setting copies of novels, short stories, plays, poems, interviews, lectures, notes toward works, essays, and criticism in English, Russian, French, Italian, and Polish. There are also manuscripts and typescripts of works relating to the author and his works. There is correspondence by the author, dating from [1919]-1977, to Mark Aleksandrovich Aldanov, Elia Kazan, Sergei Makovsky, his mother Elena Ivanovna Nabokov, his wife Véra Nabokov, Gleb Struve, Edmund Wilson, the Bollingen Foundation, the Chekhov Publishing House, the Bureau littéraire D. Clairouin, Cornell University, Doubleday & Co. Publishers, the Librarie Gallimard, Harper & Bros. Publishers, Henry Holt & Co. Publishers, McGraw-Hill Inc., New Directions Publishers, The New Yorker Magazine, G. P. Putnam's Sons Publishers, the Viking Press, George Weidenfeld & Nicholson, Ltd., and others. Many of these are accompanied by letters to the author from the correspondents and between the correspondents and the author's wife Véra Nabokov. There are also letters relating to the author, dating from 1944 to 1980, between various correspondents including Véra Nabokov, Matthew Bruccoli, Edmund Wilson, George Plimpton, and Prins & Prins Literary Agents and others.

Access to materials

Conditions Governing Use

Please note that all unpublished Russian language material, including diaries, written by Vladimir Nabokov, all Russian language correspondence between Vladimir, Vera, Elena, and Dmitri Nabokov, and all Elena Nabokov's unpublished albums are sealed until further notice.

For permission to publish, contact the Curator, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature.

Alternative form available

Most material available on microfilm. Please contact the Berg Collection.